Chicago landlords Chikoo Patel and Shai Wolkowicki are adding 518 apartments to their South Side holdings, through a plan to buy four distressed portfolios in partnership with a Milwaukee-based firm, they said.

Patel and Wolkowicki’s CKO Investments is teaming up with Scott Lurie’s F Street Investments to spend $35 million on 19 buildings in Hyde Park and South Shore, properties plagued with various financial conundrums, including foreclosures and allegations of mismanagement.

In a presentation to potential investors on Thursday, the firms said they’ve locked in deals with lenders on three of the four portfolios to assume their existing debt packages with interest rates between 3.99 and 4.6 percent, sparing the buyers from today’s higher interest rates.

The deal will come to about $68,000 per unit on average across all of the portfolios, and projected they can bring the portfolio’s value up to a little more than $108,000 per unit with new management and renovations, which are expected to cost $27,000 per unit.

“We’re seeing more bank-owned real estate and more distressed real estate. We see great opportunities in the market and these are certainly some of those,” Lurie said during the presentation.

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